by Rob Buyea
“I’m sorry,” Jessica said. She started playing with the stones now, too.
“Listen,” I said. “Like, you’re new here so let me help you out a little … if you want, that is.” I snapped my gum.
“Sure. Okay.”
I stopped playing with the stones and scooted closer to her. “Want a piece of gum?”
“No thanks,” she said.
Of course not. Little Miss Perfect. I put the gum back in my purse.
“That girl,” I said, pointing to Danielle across the playground. “You can’t miss her. She’s the fat one.” I laughed, but Jessica didn’t. “That’s Danielle. Watch out for her. She’s, like, somebody you don’t want to be friends with.”
“But don’t you sit with her in class? I thought you were friends.”
I wasn’t expecting this. Usually girls just listen and follow along. I blew a bubble and snapped my gum again. “Yeah. She used to be cool. But like, she’s been saying stuff about you. Calling you Miss Goody Two-shoes and a snotty bookworm.”
Jessica seemed surprised. “Oh. Okay. Thanks for letting me know,” she said.
“Don’t worry.” I put my arm around her. “Stick with me and I’ll, like, help you out. It’ll be great.”
Then recess ended. That’s how I got the girl war started.
Jeffrey
The kids in my class are all right. I have to deal with Alexia again. Plus her feather boas and leopard-print clothes and her stupid purse. I wonder what kind of makeup she puts on this year. She’s so dumb. She thinks she’s a Hollywood star or somethin’.
Then there’s Luke. I don’t mind him. He’s just smart and serious about school.
And Danielle’s in my class. She’s fat.
And then there’s Peter. A wise guy. A total smart aleck. I wanted to tell Terupt that Peter spent all his time in the bathroom ’cause he was messin’ around.
But Terupt figured it out, even if he was new. He seems smart. I just don’t want him tryin’ to figure me out. I’m no good in school. School sucks.
Danielle
School wasn’t so great. My teacher seemed pretty nice, and he could be funny, too, but none of that matters when you don’t have friends. Lexie had done this stuff to me before. One day she’s my friend, the next she’s not. I don’t even know why. I’m not mean to her. This year was the worst, though.
Things started out fine. Then one day after recess, Lexie started ignoring me. Pretending I wasn’t there. She would talk about things right in front of me and leave me out of the conversation. She started telling her stupid fat jokes. It was horrible. I cried at home a lot.
I’m a little heavy—well, bigger, I guess. I don’t like saying I’m fat. I don’t know why I am. I watch what I eat and I don’t have any more than the other girls at lunch. Mom says I’ll grow into my body. She’s not fat. Neither is my brother Charlie, or Grandma, or Grandpa, or Dad. Grandma says, “You’ve got to have some meat on your bones, girl.” Yeah, Grandma, I think—so someone like Lexie can tell fat jokes about me. I don’t say anything, though. Grandma doesn’t get it. Only Mom understands, and I feel a little better when she reassures me that I’ll thin out as I grow. She also tells me that there must be a reason I’m having to deal with this. “It’s making you a better person,” she says, “and someday this experience will help you.” That’s all great, but I wish I could grow into my body now.
We live on a farm. My mom grew up here. My grandma and grandpa live in their own house next to ours. They help us run the farm. So my grandma’s around a lot, and she wanted to know what was wrong with me—why I was crying.
Any time I mentioned Lexie she’d get all mad: “I’m goin’ into that school and fix that girl,” she’d say.
“No, Grandma.”
“Why are you even still friends with her? She doesn’t know how to treat people well, specially a friend.”
“It’s not her fault, Grandma. It’s this new girl’s fault,” I said, sticking up for Lexie the way I always do. “A new girl that I can’t stand.”
“If you keep telling yourself that, it won’t ever get better,” Grandma said. She’s a tough woman.
The only time I’ve got friends is when I’m in Lexie’s group. Nobody wants to be friends with the fat kid. I don’t know what to do.
Grandma said a prayer with me that night. We knelt by my bed.
“Dear God, please give Danielle the strength to stand up to these mean girls in school, or do what you can to teach Alexia a lesson. If you made her fat, that would be all right by me.”
I elbowed Grandma. “Oh, okay,” she said. “I just ask that you provide Danielle with some comfort and direction during these tough times. We pray for the good weather to hold up, and for the farm. Amen.”
anna
I didn’t say much in school, and I never raised my hand. That would have been an easy way for people to notice me, and I didn’t want to be noticed. People can be real mean. That’s something Mom warned me about. And my mom knows, trust me. I didn’t have any close friends and I wasn’t looking for any. Mom was my best friend.
Not getting noticed was never a problem for me before. I was always quiet and I behaved, so the teachers left me alone. I kept my head down and looked at the floor a lot. But I’m a good observer. Mrs. Williams, our principal, winks whenever there’s some big surprise coming. It’s something I noticed a few years ago. If you keep quiet, you have time to look and listen and take things in.
At the beginning of the year, the first thing you pay attention to is the classroom. We had a nice room. A big one. There was a whole wall of windows opposite the door. Mr. Terupt’s desk was in the corner by those windows. The students’ desks were arranged in five tables of four. So right away I knew we had a teacher who was into teamwork and who probably didn’t mind a little talking—otherwise, we would have been in old-fashioned rows. The front of the room had the blackboard and the back wall had a whiteboard. The last side of the room had all our cabinets and a sink, plus a drinking fountain. Most of the room was carpeted, except for the side by the sink and fountain. Our door was next to the fountain.
The other thing—the bigger thing you pay attention to, in the beginning—is your teacher, especially if he’s new like Mr. Terupt. Right away, I could tell that he was a reader, because there were books everywhere in our room. Mom liked that when I told her. Mom’s a library assistant in another school. It’s a good job. She has the same schedule I do, and it allows her to take some classes at night. She’s studying art, something she missed out on when she was younger. She’s really good at drawing and painting.
Mr. Terupt was young and athletic-looking. He didn’t have any pictures around his desk, and he didn’t wear a wedding ring. Ms. Newberry, from across the hall, didn’t have a wedding ring, either. Neither did Mom.
Mr. Terupt turned out to be different. He noticed me on the first day. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t raising my hand because he would say, “Anna, get ready. I’m calling on you next.” Or if we were talking about something and there wasn’t just one opinion, he would say, “Anna, what do you think?”
He wasn’t going to let me hide all year. This made me nervous, but it turned out to be a good thing in the end.
october
Peter
I never ever had something in school excite me before, but the plant unit we did with Mr. T had me fired up. We grew these bean plants from seeds, and—once they got big enough—we started doing different tests with them. Variables, Mr. T called them. First we stuffed the plants in boxes, with just a little tiny hole in the side, and we waited to see what the plants would do after a few days in the dark.
Anna had a meltdown about it. “I don’t want to put mine in a box!” she cried. Mr. T had to take her out in the hall to calm her down. I was kind of shocked. Usually she doesn’t say anything. What a weirdo, I thought. It’s no wonder she doesn’t have any friends. It’s a good thing Danielle was her partner. She’s the patient kind. Anyone else would have b
een fuming. My partner was Lexie, which was fine. She let me do what I wanted.
Next we put the plants on their side to see how they would grow. I couldn’t believe it. The plants bent and still grew up toward the ceiling. That was pretty cool. But the best part was what we got to do in the end.
Mr. T let us feed our plant any concoction we wanted to over the course of a week. There was just one rule: We couldn’t use an ingredient that would spoil and stink up the classroom, like milk, or something that wasn’t good for us to breathe, like gas.
There were some pretty wild concoctions. David and Nick used salad dressing because according to them, “Plants make salad, so the plant will like salad dressing.” Brenda and Heather used orange juice mixed with ketchup and Pepto-Bismol. I don’t know what they were thinking. Mine was the best, though.
I brought in cat litter (used), soda, and a little maple syrup. I did my best to mix it together and feed it to my plant. Lexie wasn’t real happy about my choice of ingredients. I didn’t tell her I had peed in my soda bottle some, too.
“Peter, you moron. This stuff is gonna kill our plant,” she whined.
“Shut up. You never cared about the plant before,” I said.
“Well, I care now,” she said.
“Lexie. Maple syrup comes from trees. I drink soda a lot, and I’m growing—and farmers put animal manure on their fields all the time. So zip it. It’s going to work.”
Our plant was dead in two days.
Danielle and Anna did the best. Danielle used some natural ingredients her grandmother had taught her about. Something the old-time farmers really did use, I guess. Danielle lives on a farm, so she had a big advantage. Her concoction worked. Big-time! She and Anna were the only ones to come up with food that the plant liked.
Anna was all smiles until Lexie said, “Like, you’re just lucky Danielle was your partner. She did everything.” Then Lexie turned to me and added, “Even if she is fat.” I don’t think anyone else heard, but I laughed. I know I probably shouldn’t have. Anna’s smile disappeared, and she stared at the floor.
Poor old Luke sure tried. I think he put too much brainpower in it. And he’s got a lot of brainpower. He’s been the smartest kid in school since kindergarten. His partner was Jeffrey, but he never does anything. He just let Luke take charge. Maybe he should have helped.
“I’ve brought in a number of different ingredients,” Luke said, “and they’ll interact perfectly because of the electron balance and resulting bond formations.” He even said something about a periodic table, or some crazy thing.
Well, you’re never going to believe this, but Luke mixed his junk together and it started smoking. The next thing we knew, the stupid fire alarm was going off. The whole school had to go outside and even the fire department showed up. It was great!
Mr. T had to do some explaining, and after a while we were let back inside, but Luke wasn’t performing any more experiments for us.
Man, things were just so much fun with Mr. T.
LUKE
We moved from cool math right into wicked science. The only thing I didn’t like about our science unit was that we had to have partners. I prefer to do my projects alone, but Mr. Terupt teamed us up. We were working with plants and he said we didn’t have enough space for everyone to have their own. Jeffrey was my partner, which—believe it or not—worked out great because he let me do whatever I wanted. He didn’t care. The only bad part was that he was always grumpy (dollar word).
We studied phototropisms by observing how our plant grew toward light after we stuffed it into a box that had only a tiny hole in its side. Then we studied geotropism by observing how our plant grew toward the ceiling, even after we tipped the plant on its side for a few days. And then we were given the opportunity to study a variable on our own.
Mr. Terupt told us to manipulate the plant’s nourishment. “Feed it whatever you want,” he said. “Make your own concoctions.”
Jeffrey left me alone. He hated school and everything about it.
That day I hurried home and studied my periodic table. I had received a special chemistry set last Christmas. Hydrogen and oxygen make a special bond when they come together to form water, so I figured I should try to recreate that special bond with whatever molecular (dollar word) ingredients I chose. I looked through the chemicals in my set and picked the ones that would result in the same type of electron balance that occurred in the hydrogen-and-oxygen bond.
I took my ingredients to school and got ready to measure and mix. Jeffrey was slightly interested at this point. Mr. Terupt, on the other hand, appeared a little uneasy about the whole thing, but he never stopped me.
“Luke, sometimes when you mix chemicals it can cause a reaction, which then explodes (dollar word).”
“I know,” I said.
“Maybe we shouldn’t mix these in the classroom without knowing what’s going to happen,” he said. “It might not be safe.”
“All these potions came from my chemistry set at home. My mom saw it. It’s safe,” I said, trying my best to convince Mr. Terupt. I didn’t tell Mom or Mr. Terupt about the few ingredients I got from Dad’s garage. I knew it would work.
“Hey, guys, come and look at all the stuff Luke’s mixing together,” Chris yelled.
I felt everyone gather behind me as I began mixing my substances together in a bowl, but before I could feed my plant, something happened. First the bowl started feeling warmer—then hot. The potion turned dark green—then gray. It started bubbling—first slowly, then rapidly. I knew this was bad.
“Back up! Everybody back up! Get away from it!” Mr. Terupt ordered.
Smoke started billowing from my concoction. Then the screech of the fire alarm pounded against my ears. The only other thing I heard was Peter laughing. “This is awesome!” he yelled. “Way to go, Lukester!”
“Outside! Everybody outside!” Mr. Terupt ordered.
I was done for. I was sure of it.
Wrong again.
Mr. Terupt spoke to Mrs. Williams and took the blame for everything. He even stood up to the fire marshal, who always walks through the building after an unannounced fire alarm. The marshal wanted our dollar-word posters taken off the hallway walls. He claimed they were a fire hazard. Jeffrey thought this confrontation was a big deal.
“Did you see Terupt say no to that guy?” he said. “He refused to take our posters down.”
“I saw,” I said. And I saw flashbacks of smoke pouring out of the bowl. I knew I wasn’t ever going to be a botanist (dollar word).
At least Jeffrey had gotten excited about something.
I wish Mr. Terupt hadn’t trusted us so much. Maybe it was because he was a first-year teacher and didn’t know better. But I don’t think that was it. I think it was a case of Mr. Terupt being a special teacher.
Jeffrey
Luke was tryin’ to feed our plant. I saw the smoke risin’. I knew what was gonna happen. Terupt did, too, ’cause I saw him go to the windows right away. Not fast enough, though. The alarm still went off. The whole school had to go outside ’cause of Luke.
When we came back in, some guy was walkin’ down the hall with our janitors, Mr. Lumas and Mr. Ruddy. Terupt sent us into the classroom, but he stayed in the hall. I hid by the door to listen.
“All of it!” the man yelled. “I want all of it off the walls!” He was pointing at our math posters.
Mr. Lumas looked at Terupt. “You heard him,” he said.
“I’m not taking them down,” Terupt said.
“Do you know who this is?” Mr. Ruddy said. “This is the fire marshal.”
Terupt said, “I don’t care who it is. I’m not taking them down.” He looked at the fire marshal and said, “You have no idea how hard my kids worked on these.”
He was pointing at our posters. He was pointing at my poster. It had one word on it, stupid, and it wasn’t even a dollar word. All of a sudden I felt bad ’cause I hadn’t tried on Terupt’s project.
There were s
ome more words said, but then the fire marshal left. The posters stayed. I hope he felt stupid.
Terupt came back into the room. Peter was out of his seat. “Mr. T, you just told that guy off,” Peter said, dancing around. “That was awesome!”
“No, I didn’t,” Terupt said. “Get in your seat. You shouldn’t have seen that.”
But I saw it, and I heard it. Terupt stuck up for us. There’s always posters up in the school halls, and they’re never fire hazards. I think the fire marshal was just mad about our false alarm, and I think Terupt knew that, too. He wasn’t gonna get pushed around. Our hard work mattered to Terupt—even mine. I owed him now. I had to try, even if only a little.
anna
I didn’t want my plant to die. I didn’t want to put it in the box. Everybody was staring at me. I started crying.
Mr. Terupt took me out into the hall. “Anna, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to kill my plant,” I blurted out. My back slid down the wall and I put my head in my hands.
“We’re not going to kill your plant.” Mr. Terupt knelt down in front of me.
“Yes, you are,” I said. “If we put it in the box, it’s going to kill it.”
“We’ll take it out before it dies,” he promised.
“No. I don’t want to hurt it.”
“Tell you what, Anna. Let’s do the experiments that are lined up for your plant. We have to, because Danielle is your partner and she needs to do the science, too. Then, when we’re all done, I’ll let you take my plant. Our control. The one we don’t do anything to.”